Re: [piecepack] Re: New piecepack game design contest

[Jorge Arroyo <trozo@...>]

Usually by participating in a contest where the price is the publication of
your work, you're automatically granting the contest organizer a license to
publish your work. So that's really not a problem.

I agree about the advantages of free licenses but I wouldn't want to force
people to give away their games totally. I appreciate it when people don't
limit comercial usage (and I've done so in some of my games) but I
understand if they don't want other people to make money off their work.
Especially if they think they will be publishing the games themselves at
some point. To me what's important is that the games are available to people
to play, and a CC NC license still allows that.

The fact that the piecepack is totally free is great because it makes it
very easy for people to make comercial sets, but those of us selling
piecepacks don't really need to include every game in existance. There are
plenty of places online to get the actual games, so really, I don't think
the fact one game has a NC licence and another one doesn't won't make much
difference in the end...

The contest organizers are letting people choose their own license, from
totally restrictive with a specific license to them for publishing the
winners, to totally free. I think that's excellent. Restricting the set of
licenses allowed in the contest will only reduce the amount of submissions,
and I don't really see any advantage for the organizers, because they will
always be allow to use the games commercially anyway...

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Ben Finney
<ben+yahoogroups@benfinney.id.au<ben%2Byahoogroups@...>
> wrote:

> Jorge Arroyo <trozo@...> writes:
>
> > Why should people not want to limit comercial use of their games?
>
> That's for them to decide. You might just as easily ask why people would
> not want to limit commercial use of programs and music; yet there is
> plenty of such culture free of commercial restriction.
>
> In fact, there's a nice game set design that you might have heard of,
> where the creators have very good reason not to limit derived works and
> commercial use. I believe it's called Piecepack.
>
> I can tell you why I would do it: to ensure that my work can be sold by
> people in a position to do so, getting the work into many more people's
> hands without needing to involve me in the process of selling it.
>
> With attribution required (the CC-BY clause), I still get the reputation
> as an author of the work; and with redistribution restricted to the same
> license terms (the CC-SA clause), every recipient must receive the same
> freedoms in the work, preventing a monopoly.
>
> Others may find their own reasons. I'm encouraging CC-BY-SA-3.0 as being
> an easy-to-apply license that would guarantee the work remains free
> while making it easy for recipients to develop and sell.
>
> > I guess by participating in the contest you're already giving them
> > permission to publish the rules to your game. If they don't say
> > anything about licenses I guess it means they don't care beyond that.
>
> Unfortunately, the default situation with creative works like game
> designs is that, once they are in a tangible form (such as writing them
> into an electronic document for submission to a game design contest)
> they are automatically copyright to the person who did it.
>
> Nobody apart from the copyright holder has any right (with very limited
> exceptions) to any of the acts of copyright ? including copying, and/or
> modifying, and/or redistributing, etc. ? without explicit license from
> the copyright holder. The default situation is ?all rights reserved?,
> and it takes explicit grant of license to change that.
>
> Receiving a game design from someone without an explicit copyright
> license does nothing to change that situation.
>
> That's a really annoying situation, since it means everyone who wants
> someone else to use their work must learn how to apply a proper
> copyright license. It's why generally-useable free licenses like the GPL
> or CC-BY-SA are a good thing, because they can be easily applied to
> grant freedom in the work if that's what the copyright holder intends.
>
> > And I'm fine with it...
>
> I would be fine with it too, but we don't have that unless the copyright
> holder (by default, the authors of the game design) explicitly grants
> recipients that freedom in a copyright license properly applied.
>
> --
>  &#92;      ?The best mind-altering drug is truth.? ?Jane Wagner, via Lily |
>  `&#92;                                                            Tomlin |
> _o__)                                                                  |
> Ben Finney
>
>
>
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